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What is accountability? What relation does it have to liberty, obligation, or guilt? Accountability is an adaptive response of an intellectual and moral nature to the contingency of the world. The scope of changes in the contemporary world plunges us into a dialectic of destruction and creation, which confronts us with death anxiety. Therefore, accountability is no more founded on joining collectives such as family, organizations, unions, classes, parties, or nations than on a personal commitment to others. It tends to unite opposite objectives; it looks for mediating third terms, realistic utopias (Edgar Morin), such as sustainable development, social or united economy; it aims not at rallying people to the great causes of economic progress, social revolution, anti-globalization, or at the daily compromises of Realpolitik. Instead, it focuses on integrating present contradictions in order to protect the future based on an attitude referred to here as “radical moderation.”